A glitch in the glitz

“Le Reve” (The Dream) is the title of a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso owned by Steve Wynn and the name originally intended for his new $2.7-billion hotel, Wynn Las Vegas. It’s also the name of the latest visionary showroom spectacle by writer-director Franco Dragone,who helped define Cirque du Soleil style in nine productions from 1987 to 1999.

Although not part of the Cirque du Soleil empire, “Le Reve” inevitably bore a strong family resemblance at its premiere Friday in the Wynn’s $70-million, 2,087-seat showroom.

Predictably thrilling, first to last, it expands on the innovations of Dragone’s brilliant long-running aquacade “O” by using water -- 1.1 million gallons of it here -- as its versatile, volatile star performer.

Like “O” (at the Bellagio Hotel), “Le Reve takes place in, around and above a circular pool with an adjustable floor, so that performers sometimes run across it as if it were merely a wet street but a moment or two later dive deeply into its depths.

Once again, characters suddenly float up into view as if emerging from a concealed submarine or diving bell, but this time enormous sculptural set-units (many of them fountain towers) also suddenly sprout from the surface of the pool and raise performers high above it.

Early on, for example, Andrey Moreau does torturous balances atop a giant tree that arises in the middle of the pool, while 10 other men climb it and dive from it in increasingly complex patterns. Just try not to gasp.

Where “O” renews Cirque du Soleil’s multicultural exoticism, “Le Reve” aims at a more unified neo-Expressionist style, and instead of stringing together a number of acts -- specialty performances that existed long before the show came into being -- much of it looks created from scratch.

“O” emphasizes women, while “Le Reve” glories in its phenomenal male swimmers, divers and aerialists -- all of them, except those cast in comedy or character roles, shaved bald and waxed. Most significantly, perhaps, “Le Reve” differs from all its predecessors by placing its wonders in Las Vegas’ first theater in the round.

Designed by Claude Santerre, that theater is divided into vertical layers, and as you gaze at its dome more than 80 feet above the pool and then start to look down, you’ll see five dozen life-size nude mannequins clawing the air under the dome and below them a grid of ornate window-panels showing giant, moving (computer-animated) faces that are soon replaced by environmental video imagery.

Of course, divers do inevitably plunge from that dome into the pool. However some of the most memorable moments in “Le Reve” are more unexpected: a rainstorm ending with more than 200 white homing pigeons flying overhead (multiplied on the video screens). Or three women (Genevieve Garneau, Amelie Lupien and Verinoque Jean) balancing in and on a giant suspended openwork globe that keeps falling and rising at high speed. Or a turbulent gymnastic duet for Tomasz “Wilu” Wilkosz and Grzegorz Ros that looks like extreme gladiatorial foreplay.

When you’re dazzled by the company’s flawless virtuosity in such passages or atop mammoth cargo nets and hoop trapezes, you start to think of “Le Reve” like Leni Reifenstahl’s classic documentary film “Olympia”: a superbly edited montage of idealized human prowess.

But the show isn’t the breakthrough that Dragone wants it to be -- it hasn’t got the guts to tell a real story or no story at all but instead relies on a slightly tweaked version of the standard, stale Cirque ploy of drafting someone from the audience to be our wide-eyed surrogate.

Here it’s Wayne Wilson, sometimes under the influence of an old shaman or seer (Gonzalo Munoz Ferrer), sometimes in pursuit of an elusive aerialist (Sarah Molasky) but usually as passive as little Clara in “The Nutcracker.” You notice him because he’s all in red, but his character brings no other colors to the evening.

As always in his Dragone collaborations, composer Benoit Jutras supplies plenty of lush, orchestral atmosphere, but his pop songs prove more distinctive than the rhythmic choral passages in which he sounds likes he’s dreaming he’s Carl Orff.

Similarly, Dragone and his designers by now ought to be way beyond the borrowings from Surrealist painter Rene Magritte that have become a Cirque cliche and are newly transplanted here. Steve Wynn doesn’t have knockoffs in his art gallery, so why put them in his showroom?

Subtitled “a small collection of imperfect dreams,” the whole production reflects an attempt to make the most expensive theater technology and the most disciplined muscle power on the planet seem somehow fanciful, a momentary trick of the mind. You have to love Dragone for that -- and to hope that he reaches further, and deeper, next time around.